Labelling of Goods in Storage

Sometimes you may need (or wish) to consider putting your household goods into storage for a period.

Perhaps you’re going overseas on assignment and have sold-up or perhaps there’s just a delay between you selling one house and being able to take possession of another.

Whatever the cause, you may end up putting your items into storage following a household removal.

As we’ve touched on before, there are typically three ways of doing so:

You can rent an enclosed self-contained storage unit dedicated exclusively to your personal use. You have the key and nobody else can access it or get near to your possessions.

You can rent a container which you (or we) pack at your home, lock and then arrange to have it transported to and offloaded into, a storage warehouse.

You can rent some space in a large warehouse where you can then store your boxes, cartons and furniture.

We won’t say anything about the first two options because they’re typically not a problem but if you opt for the third route, you need to be very careful about labelling.

Why?

Well, typically the third option might (though only ‘might’) be the lowest cost but it does come with some risks. The largest of those is undoubtedly the fact that warehouse personnel quite often ‘rationalise and optimise’ the way things are stored. In other words, they move things around as needs dictate.

So, the warehouse might have been full when your goods were offloaded and as a result, they’re sitting perhaps near the front door. If a few days later it’s much quieter, someone might decide to move all your goods further back and alongside a wall etc.

There is absolutely nothing necessarily wrong with that except the more your items are moved, the more chances there are that they’ll be accidentally damaged as a result. There is also a much higher chance of some of your boxes being accidentally separated from the others.

The solution is firstly to opt for self-contained storage units where possible but if that’s not an option, make sure all your individual pieces are clearly and indelibly labelled!